115) Chloe (2009)

115) Chloe (2009) Dir: Atom Egoyan Date Released: March 2010 Date Seen: March 26, 2010 Rating: 2.5/5

I'm probably being too generous but I could watch it for the most part. See my review for the New York Press.

451) Adoration (2008)

451) Adoration (2008) Dir: Atom Egoyan Date Released: May 2009 Date Seen: December 17, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

The holistic impression of weighty complexity that Adoration, Atom Egoyan's latest story about stories, ambiguity and video tape, exhudes is what makes it such an accomplished later work in his already stacked filmography. Its focus shifts so constantly that it perfectly fits Simon's (Devon Bostick), its young protagonist, desire to alienate and explode his community's need for events to be fastidiously neat and digestibly coherent. Simon wants something to happen that can destroy his dead parents' tragic image so he tells his classmates a story about how they were terrorists. That impulse to consciously raze his family's status to achieve personal stability is a naive and selfish decision, one that stems from an irrational desire to complicate Simon's family history for the sake of simplifying it, a contradiction in terms that Egoyan's been enamored with for decades now. Adoration in that sense is not so much an evolution of his films' overall argument but rather an outstanding expression of his pet themes.

Adoration is about why its seemingly disparate events come together because of simultaneously artificial ways and means and no discernible reason at all because all of the film's various dialectical conflicts are all equal in Egoyan's eyes because they all revolve around the same fruitless search for finite moral difference. Black-and-white ideology cannot exist for long because there are always corrupting shades of grey.

For example, take the conflict between Simon's exploitation of digital photography and Egoyan's impressive measured camerawork. Simon on the one hand uses the immediacy of webcam and film footage taken on his camera phone to needle his audience into disbelieving the complicated story he unveils. It's a live feed and the all-seeing eye of new media never flinches. On the other hand, he's performing for the camera. You can see this in the guarded way he takes a sip of water before addressing his interactive audience in a chat room and the way that he handily takes out his camera phone cued up to the exact spot in his reams of digital footage that he wants to show them.

Just as Simon defies the "What you see is what you get" reality of the technological medium he's using, so too does Egoyan refuse the audience pronounced narrative clarity in the way the film's treacherously innocuous flashbacks undermine his saliently deliberate, confident camerawork, full of terse tracking shots and pans. While the former seduces the viewer with promises of a straightforward narrative trajectory, the latter sleepily throws the viewer for a loop, forcing them to infrequently backtrack and figure out what scene goes where and why. The fact that Egoyan is so capable of stacking the deck to make Simon's point proves that he can still make thoughtful provocations with the best of them.

347) Exotica (1994)

347) Exotica (1994) Dir: Atom Egoyan Date Released: March 1995 Date Seen: October 17, 2009 Rating: 3.5/5

Exotica is the first of Atom Egoyan's most highly regarded films I've seen and thus far, the most frigid. While I was consistently engaged because of its deviousness, the fact that Egoyan deals with the "other"ing of characters at so many removes from an identifiable perspective and deprives the viewer of a standard of "normalcy" to refer to is often, y'know, frustrating. Case in point: Thomas Pinto (Don McKellar) gets off on the ritual of brining men to the ballet but why the ballet, what about the spectacle he's attending that attracts him, is never even hinted at. Nevertheless, the film's density, or to put it more finely, the way that Egoyan exoticizes the mundane and vice versa, is often fascinating. In the Club Exotica, being possessive of someone necessarily makes you fantasize about familiarizing yourself with them. Both Francis (Bruce Greenwood)--"How could they ever take you away from me?"--and Eric (Elias Koteas)-- "What is it about a girl that gives her that special innocence, gentlemen? Such a thing you have absolutely no control over?"--radiate festering pain. But a man can't subsist on bruised egos alone.

336) Speaking Parts (1989) and 337) Calendar (1993)

336) Speaking Parts (1989) Dir: Atom Egoyan Date Released: February 1990 Date Seen: October 11, 2009 Rating: 3.25/5

337) Calendar (1993) Dir: Atom Egoyan Date Released: March 1994 Date Seen: October 11, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

As the lens through which he begs his viewer to see his films, Atom Egoyan's preoccupation with the camera as the meta-reflexive creator of both objective documents and indecipherable symbols is inherently confrontational. It insists that his audience pay rapt attention and constantly question what they're looking at, requiring an admirable level of vigilance that few of his contemporaries ask for quite so bluntly. That however means that when he doesn't deliver a film worthy of that attention, no matter how thoughtful its component scenes may be, the urge to dismiss Egoyan as a charlatan comes almost instinctually. Which isn't to say that that feeling of being cheated isn't warranted sometimes.

In Speaking Parts, Egoyan indirectly recalls the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that great theory that most people probably know from Michael Crichton's novels (I learned about it in a Physics course; so there). Heisenberg suggested that the act of observing an object can inherently change the nature of that object's behavior. Here, Egoyan ditches the microscope for his usual VHS camera, following two characters as they inevitably fall prey to their need to assert their dominance over video tapes. They both believe films are stoic documents recorded for posterity's sake and each try in their own ways to control what parts of them are recorded. Lance is an actor (Shawn McManus) who tries to alter his first big role to suit Clara's (Gabrielle Rose), the writer/his lover(?)'s, wishes. At the same time, Lisa (Arsinee Khanjian) struggles to find a way to interrogate the static images of Lance's performances she watches so she can get closer to him. This being an Egoyan film, they both obviously fail in their respective goals* and the film ends with a moot, clumsy but effective finale where various haunting, staticky, pre-recorded images lead Lance and Lisa to be literally swallowed up by the technology they seek to dominate.

Egoyan's films posit that the camera will always be independent of its users' control. No mater how hard viewers or recorders try to assert control of events, certain key information will always prove elude them, like the fact that Lance was initially hired to meet Clara as a prostitute through the hotel he works for and she's staying at. This is only pointedly only mentioned in passing, to show that even we, the viewer, cannot have a comprehensive, God's-eye view of events. The camera sees and we just try to tease out what meaning we can.

That understanding is expressed in a less censuring tone in Calendar, in which Egoyan plays a man, identified only as "Photographer," as he struggles to respond to "Translator" (Khanjian again), his ex-wife, after she begs him to tell her what he sees when he looks at the photos he took for a calendar of Armenian churches the two collaborated on. Calendar's set-up welcomes the viewer into its protagonist's ritualized process of remembering events by showing us the mechanism he uses to do so. "Translator" arranges dates with bi-lingual call girls so that he can re-insert himself back into the images he took on camera and camcorder. He always asks his dates to make a phone call in another language after he's poured them a glass of red wine, insisting that the women speak in any language that sounds similar to Armenian. This allows "Translator" to submerge himself in the same feeling of impotence he felt at the time, when he watched jealously as his wife was bonded (and perhaps more) with their local driver (Ashot Adamyan).

It also allows us to start out appreciating Egoyan's premise of the Armenian-speaking driver, as guide and camera-stand-in, as impenetrable. From the start, both "Translator" and the viewer have to understand that there will be no big, or at least no complete, picture to decipher, just fragments. This may not sound like its substantially different from Speaking Parts, but considering how insistent Egoyan is on rebuking that film's protagonists' need for clarity/control, Calendar's more open but no less wounded characters' dilemma presents a more honest take on video culture.

*Spoilery Note: I don't think the kiss at the end is possible without the mental anguish of their respective breakdowns. She has to disappear into pixelated snow first and he to get dissolved into the conflicted video images. Their happiness is only possible after they get destroyed by media.

305) Family Viewing (1987)

305) Family Viewing (1987) Dir: Atom Egoyan Date Released: July 1988 Date Seen: September 21, 2009 Rating: 1.75/5

The submerged undertones of menace that made Atom Egoyan's Next of Kin so unsettling are thawed out in his third feature, Family Viewing and boy, do they reek. Egoyan's sentimental, self-righteous portrayal of Van (Aidan Tierney), a pampered recent college graduate's Oedipal struggle to wrest control of his ailing, bed-ridden grandmother Armen (Selma Keklikian) from his uncaring monster of a father, Stan (character actor David Hemblen*), is frankly dumb. Though Egoyan's fixation with fictitious video memories and fantasies is sometimes still effectively creepy, Family Viewing is a loaded scenario full of obnoxious and ill-conceived arguments in its protagonist's favor. 

The case against Stan is appallingly simple. Van disdains his father because Stan's never visited Armen in the hospital because he not only put her there but also, as Egoyan overtly suggests early on, ruined her health by never visiting. Stan's also a pervert with a domination fetish, showing how his sexual perversion dominates his life--"He likes to be in control," Van sneers. Which is funny, because I'm pretty sure what Van's doing isn't any less possessive, just necessarily more unimpeachable in its conviction. 

Van stays with Armen without fail, putting his personal and professional life after her needs and constantly searching for any opportunity to make her more comfortable. Then again, he also, in order to keep her away from Stan, fakes Armen's death, takes her out of the hospital and then concocts an elaborate scheme that eventually wrests on her surviving the trauma of being re-institutionalized as an unidentified hobo at a facility whose location would be determined by, y'know, medical professionals. Even if I hadn't seen Next of Kin, I'm positive that that kind of rigged fight for custody of the living past just wouldn't cut it with me.

*Hemblen was the voice of Magneto in the X-Men cartoon from the 90s. Never forget that voice!

304) Next of Kin (1984)

304) Next of Kin (1984) Dir: Atom Egoyan Date Released (DVD): June 2001 Date Seen: September 21, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

As my entree into the filmography of widely praised Egyptian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Next of Kin has made me very eager to check out the rest of Egoyan's filmography. According to IMDB, Next of Kin is only his second feature but in it, he's already created a vivid and unsettling story out of remarkably compact and commendably complex visual metaphors. All of this on an aglet-less shoestring budget and at the age of 24. Forgive my Valley Girl-like amazement but: seriously? Wow.

Next of Kin is the enigmatic portrait of Peter (Patrick Tierney), a 23 year-old blueblood that seeks to use his dissociative personality disorder, something he dismisses as a tendency to want to "make believe," to find happiness with another family. The film's narrative completely absorbs us into his POV, allowing us to see Peter through his own kaleidoscope of ever-congealing fragments. It's his way of showing us that he can assume whatever role is required of him in his quest to feel wanted, nay, needed by his family. 

Peter begins by showing us a piece of luggage on a conveyor belt from its perspective. Peter is that valise but he's also sitting on a bench watching the bag go round the airport's carousel. In this scene, interwoven with a brief summation of his philosophy of schizoid ego mortification, Peter shows us his ideal self-image, a container of things meticulously squared away to suit a specific purpose, giving him just the bare essential for his "vacation" away from his biological parents. He can pick himself up or let himself take another turn around the room, which he of course does to make his point. Later, he will remind us that he's in control in varied and sundry ways, by inserting staticky video footage of himself in family therapy during an unrelated conversation later, marginalizing his family's reaction to the film's events by leaving them mute in the film's coda and, of course, breaking the fourth wall with a knowing smile worthy of a teething crocodile.

To put this notion into practice, Peter worms his way into the hearts of the Deryans, an older Middle-Eastern family that lost their first-born son, Bedros, to Child Protective Services and were never able to reclaim him. Peter pretends to be Bedros first as an experiment, wheedling his way into the Deryans' hearts by literally offering them whatever emotional deficit that the real Bedros' absence has caused. By the end however, just when he's about to move on, he capriciously decides to stay on living with them. What began as a means of proving to himself, and us, his imaginary audience, his improvisatory skills, suddenly turns into a lifestyle. 

That abrupt denouement clinches the disturbing detachment of Peter's performance. The sudden realization that he now plans on permanently shacking up with the Deryans belies but never resolves the unsettling hint that this was his intention the whole time. Almost all of Egoyan's awkward steps towards establishing that disarmingly curt finale, including his insistence on using photography to provide a meta-reflexive confirmation of the Deryans' selective memories, can be forgiven because of that miasma of lingering uncertainty it leaves in its wake. I want more, more, gimme gimme.